THE MEDIA BUSINESS

THE MEDIA BUSINESS; Reshaping The Los Angeles Times

By ALEX S. JONES, Special to The New York Times

Published: June 18, 1990

LOS ANGELES—
Rather than celebrate its recently achieved status as the nation's largest metropolitan daily newspaper, The Los Angeles Times is engaged in polite but bruising internal warfare regarding its future.

The Times, with daily circulation of 1.2 million spread over an area the size of Ohio, is re-inventing itself, and the battle is over how much to change in the pursuit of new readers.

''It comes down to the issue of the extent to which we can target the paper for different localities and at the same time produce The Los Angeles Times,'' said Noel Greenwood, a senior editor and part of a panel preparing a master plan for the paper. ''The question is, 'Where is the balance?' ''

The Times, like many other metropolitan newspapers, is in a monumental struggle with a host of aggressive, intensely local suburban dailies that have taken readers and advertising dollars. Like other papers, it is also fighting a trend of low newspaper readership among younger people.

Became No. 1 in March

The paper is the flagship of the Times Mirror Company, which also publishes Newsday in the New York area, The Hartford Courant and The Baltimore Sun. As of March 31, The Los Angeles Times moved ahead of The Daily News in New York as the largest metropolitan daily newspaper, according to a report by the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

While The Los Angeles Times's marketing situation is quite unusual in some respects, the internal debate over what and how much to change to attract nonsubcribers is taking place at large newspapers elsewhere.

In one camp at The Times are the traditionalists, including much of the news staff, especially some longtime editors who see considerable virtue in having Times readers from Santa Barbara to San Diego receive essentially the same newspaper.

This group is skeptical of such recent decisions as the granting of almost complete autonomy to the Orange County edition, which is locked in fierce competition with The Orange County Register. The Times's Orange County edition, with generous quantities of front-page color, zoned advertising and a nonstop effort to ''orafy'' - or localize - every article, often seems very different from the grayer and more broadly focused paper that goes to most of its other readers.

In the other camp are the revolutionaries, who are pushing to ''orafy'' - a word that makes traditionalists shudder - the whole paper, in looks and local focus.

Ultimately, the decisions about what changes, what remains and what is jettisoned will be made by the two outsiders recently put in charge of the newspaper, David A. Laventhol, the publisher, and C. Shelby Coffey 3d, the editor.

But while both acknowledge that change is afoot, they have not yet made clear just how different the new Los Angeles Times will be.

''I don't think The Times is changing course in a radical sense, but the world is changing,'' Mr. Laventhol said. ''There's no question that, in addition to global, people want local.''

While The Times has been redesigned with summaries and other devices intended to make it easier to read, the revolutionaries would go much further. For instance, they would greatly curtail the number of very long articles for which the paper is famous, or perhaps even notorious.

Some of the revolutionaries, who seem to include most of the top business executives and the newer editors, say they would like to see each of the zoned editions for the San Fernando Valley, Ventura County, San Diego County and Orange County and the ''core edition'' - which goes everywhere else, including Los Angeles - edited as a quasi-independent local paper. The editions might also have separate names, as in The Times/Orange County instead of The Los Angeles Times/Orange County.

Mr. Greenwood, The Times senior editor, who is viewed by many as a traditionalist, said using the Orange County edition as a model for the entire paper ''would be a mistake, and I've said so often and vociferously.''

But Carol Stogsdill, a revolutionary and the new editor of the Orange County edition, would like to change its name, as well as much of the entire paper.

Mr. Laventhol and Mr. Coffey say the paper's thrust toward being local will not come at the expense of its national and international coverage.

For instance, after starting an edition in Ventura County, northwest of Los Angeles, they counterbalanced that move with a new weekly section on international news, World Report, to showcase the paper's corps of more than 25 foreign correspondents.

Similarly, a new statewide edition and a revamped Sunday magazine are being prepared, and plans are being made for the weekly publication of Nuestro Tiempo, a Spanish-language supplement that appears 15 times a year.

Mr. Laventhol and Mr. Coffey rule out the idea that The Times could subdivide itself into a cluster of autonomous local newspapers.

But short of that, the possibilities are wide open.

''The question we're dealing with is not one of science, but one of art, editorial art,'' Mr. Coffey said.

Real Change Sought

Without question, the mandate from Robert F. Erburu, chairman of Times Mirror since 1986, is for genuine change.

Within the last two years, most of the paper's top news and business managers have been replaced, often by outsiders.